Like Cliven Bundy, Raymond Yowell operated a small cattle ranch in Nevada, and refused to pay the federal government grazing fees to which they are neither morally nor legally entitled. In May 2002, the BLM mounted a paramilitary operation to confiscate Yowell’s 132-head cattle herd for refusal to pay grazing fees. The rustlers then billed the rancher $180,000, and began to garnish his monthly Social Security check when he declined to honor their impudent demand.

As is the case with every such agreement, the federal government acted in cynical bad faith, using the treaty to secure a foothold within a territory slated for assimilation into the continent-straddling behemoth being constructed through Manifest Destiny.

While demanding that the Shoshone refrain from interfering with telegraph lines and stagecoach routes, the Feds did nothing to discourage or deter illegal settlements on Shoshone land. In 1962 – one year shy of the centennial of the Ruby Valley Treaty – the federal Indian Claims Commission proclaimed that this pattern of federally abetted “gradual encroachment” by Euro-American settlers and speculators had “extinguished” all Shoshone claims to their lands.

In the fashion of a rapist who offers to buy his victim breakfast in order to re-fashion his crime into a “date,” the Feds offered to “compensate” the Shoshones through a settlement amounting to fifteen cents an acre. This figure was based on a valuation of the lands conducted in 1872 – long before the discovery of significant mineral wealth on the property, which included the Carlin Trend, which contain North America’s largest gold deposits.

The Shoshones refused to accept the federal proposal. Those in charge of the land grab bureaucracy replied with a “Sucks to be you shrug” and “paid” the money to itself, insisting that this bookkeeping feint somehow made the “transaction” legally binding.

At this point it’s worth remembering this pious utterance by Commissar Harry Reid: “We can’t have an American people that [sic] violate the law and then just walk away from it.” This is precisely how the purulent Regime Reid serves acquired its supposedly legal claim to lands in the state he supposedly represents.

“I kept writing letters to them saying I didn’t have a debt with them, that I never signed a contract,” Yowell observed in an AP interview three years ago. “But they just ignored it. There’s no use talking to them.”

Yowell has filed an appeal to the US Supreme Court. The US Solicitor General’s Office is scheduled to file its response – most likely a motion to dismiss the petition -- on June 4.

The Regime has the luxury of time: It can continue mulcting the octogenarian victim’s Social Security checks while waiting for him to expire, along with the residual legal claims made by the surviving Shoshones.

From the Regime’s point of view, all of this is a justified exercise of “plenary” authority over Indian lands obtained through conquest of an inferior race.

In the 1823 case Johnson and Gram’s Lessee v. William McIntosh, the U.S. Supreme Court held that while Indians “were admitted to be the rightful occupants of the soil, with a legal as well as just claim to retain possession of it,” they were denied clear title to their property – that is, the “power to dispose of the soil at their own will, to whomsoever they pleased.”

Ownership of the land on which the Indians lived was supposedly transferred from them to the newly arrived Europeans through royal grants issued by monarchs acting on authority derived from the Pope. According to the Court, those decrees by distant kings of whom the Indians had never heard were sufficient to “convey the soil as well as the right of dominion to the grantees.”

Henry Wheaton, who was the reporter for the Supreme Court at the time of that ruling, later wrote that the Indians tribes, as “heathens,” were “the lawful spoil and prey of their civilized conquerors” and that it was a “maxim of policy and of law, that the right of the native Indians was subordinate to that of the first Christian discoverer.” Arch-nationalist legal commentator Joseph Story elaborated on this idea, describing the Indians as “infidels, heathens, and savages [who] were not allowed to possess the prerogatives belonging to absolute, sovereign and independent nations.”

Nothing in the US Constitution justifies the institutionalized assumption that the federal government had the right to act as “trustee” on behalf of its so-called Indian “wards.”

The Supreme Court struggled to find constitutional warrant for that belief in the 1886 case United States v. Kagama. When the text refused to yield the desired outcome, Justice Samuel Miller (a Lincoln appointee, natch) threw up his hands and concluded that the plenary authority to regulate Indian affairs grew out of “the ownership of the country … and the right of exclusive sovereignty which must exist in the National Government, and can be found nowhere else.”

The “finders keepers” or “might makes right” approach to Indian affairs “has never been repudiated,” notes Yowell’s brief. “It is the continuing basis for all aspects of federal Indian law.” The federal government insists that it is acting on “well-settled” legal principles. The brief ripostes that “slavery and racial segregation were considered `well-settled’ law, and were nonetheless subject to challenge as fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution and the principles of respect for human rights.”

“The Native American tribes at the time of the European settlement and founding of the United States were, virtually without exception, steeped in the basest forms of superstition, had been guilty of savagery in warfare for hundreds of years, and practiced the most debased forms of sexuality,” Fischer opined. Since Indians, on Fischer’s proudly ignorant reading of the relevant history, “resisted the appeal of Christian Europeans to leave behind their superstition … for the light of Christianity and civilization,” their dispossession by the federal government was not only defensible, but morally necessary.

Many of the same bien-pensants and self-appointed watchdogs who performed cadenzas of indignation over Fischer’s foolish little screed are prominent defenders of the BLM in its confrontation with Cliven Bundy, as the agency -- following the same premises as those endorsed by Fischer -- seeks to do to Bundy what it has done to Raymond Yowell, the Dann family, and other members of the Western Shoshone nation who have sought to defend their lands.

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